Fetch by Colin Bramwell; Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney; The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber by Jay Gao; Belling the Leopard by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley; The Matter by Padraig Regan

Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between source and target language, there is always a gap; the translator endeavours within that gap to identify meaning and intention, and that is the difficult work of translation. Fetch, Bramwell’s own debut collection, lyrically thematises this gap in the poet-human’s condition: “I’m an instrument for something else / a digital piano that if you opened it up / you wouldn’t understand the wiring.” Fetch (in Celtic folklore, a doppelganger) is by turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout. Here you’ll find deep engagement with Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, poems that fuse Scots and English, alongside filial memories and premonitions of fatherhood. “Death is certain, but back then I was too young for that shit.” For a debut, Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.

Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Before theme and subject, there is the pure, iridescent beauty of Esfandiari-Denney’s sentences; a singular voice that is alluring and sensuous, pleasurable to follow to whichever subject the poet chooses. The subjects are girlhood-cum-womanhood, the line between debilitating illness and delusional wellness (“thank god / you invested / in lion’s mane”), the flickering concept of free will for a species so programmed by genes: “I have wondered to what extent my cancer diagnosis is my mother’s, or my grandmother’s cell mutation, before my own … I look up from a cigarette mid-sentence…” The collection hybridises recognisable prose forms: the essay, the diary, the text message, the anecdote. These are interspliced with short-lined lyric poems that startle because of the bubbly voice from which they come: “I hope it’s ok to die. I can / become something / like actualised metaphor.” The magic of this collection is that it is never highfalutin, finding a way to make an ending like “DJ are you listening did you read to the end will you blow my voice a kiss” powerfully funny and moving.

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Nacho Pezzati’s new album Swerved taps into the moody ambience of the UK north-west underground, ratcheting a tangible and thrilling sense of unease

From Barcelona, Spain
Recommend if you like Space Afrika, Shackleton, Purelink
Up next Swerved out now

Swerved, by Barcelona-based producer Nueen (Nacho Pezzati) is a bassy, moody, darkly ambient album that travels through R&B, drill, cloud rap and dub without any obvious changes in its grey-black weather. But this is slowly churning music, on the brink of rot. By the 10th track, Copicat, the unease is tangible; after a slow, agonising ratcheting build of fanbelt hi-hats, the album’s only drop arrives with the weight and power of a cloudburst. It’s thrilling.

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Burnham and Macron have committed to going further in the crackdown on French beaches. But little is being done to offer refugees safe alternative routes

Garang*, 18, is one of thousands of refugees recently caught in the crossfire of French riot police, who threw teargas and beat them with batons when they boarded dinghies to travel to the UK. He is a victim of a war in his home of South Sudan – and one being fought on France’s northern shores.

He borrows a phone from anyone with credit who will let him try to call home, where his family is displaced. Garang doesn’t have enough money on the £10-a-week allowance from the Home Office to make a long-distance call. All he wants is to speak to his mum, to hear her voice, and let her know he is alive and safe in the UK despite the violence he has faced.

Diane Taylor writes on human rights, racism and civil liberties

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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James Gunn and Peter Safran’s regime had good reasons to ditch Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavill’s Superman. Other choices have been much harder to fathom

There was never going to be a completely painless way to break up the old DC gang. Warner Bros’ DC Extended Universe probably needed to be ruthlessly ripped apart in order to create space for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s brand-new DCU. We almost certainly did need a clean break from the likes of Ben Affleck (Batman) and Henry Cavill (Superman), if only to persuade audiences that this really was a proper reboot. The question, as Gal Gadot may have been pondering this week, is quite why some of the old universe’s supporting players were smuggled safely into the new continuity while others were left sprawling amid the ruins.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gadot, who starred in two solo Wonder Woman movies for director Patty Jenkins, revealed that nobody at DC Studios ever formally told her she had been dropped. One minute, Gadot says, she was being assured by Gunn and Safran that they would develop a third instalment with her; the next, she was looking on in mounting alarm as the entire infrastructure of the previous DC continuum was blown to smithereens. “They were like, ‘We’re going to develop it with you, the third one,’” she said. “But I saw the way everybody else was handled, right? And I, you know – the Henry [Cavill] situation was unfortunate. I was in the middle of that. The Henry situation was not handled elegantly, to say the least. Same with Patty – it was not handled elegantly.”

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Nadat Lisa werd vermoord door een doorgedraaide asielzoeker die hier helemaal niet meer had mogen zijn belandde dit land in een collectieve psychose van cognitieve dissonantie. Om in onze jacht op troost en comfort maar niet te hoeven spreken over de rol van migratie en de (culturele) achtergrond van daders wezen we voornamelijk naar de 'manosfeer' (het zijn ook altijd mannen!), maar ook naar de fietsroutes en naar stedenbouw en naar die godvergeten ongesnoeide bosjes en naar extreemrechts en naar tig andere zaken. We bedachten een heel pakket aan 'oplossingen': van lespakketten op scholen, tot afkoelhuizen, tot gps-trackers, tot hosts bij metrostations. Dappere vrouwen zamelen geld in en gaan de straat op om de nacht op te eisen. Behalve dan als het rechts in de kaart speelt, of het vermoeden bestaat dat er 'een discussie over asielzoekers of opvanglocaties' gevoerd gaat worden. Dan niet.

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ajpscs posted a photo:

東京で雨
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© ajpscs

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Tarumizu Ruins
垂水遺跡

It seems the Tarumizu Ruins might have been created by excavating beneath large rocks; there are scattered spots that resemble caves.

垂水遺跡はこのように大きな岩の下を掘られてできたのかな、洞窟っぽい箇所が点々とあります。

Yamagata city, Yamagata pref, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Akagawa fireworks festival
赤川花火大会

My feeling is the atmosphere of an autumn night. Fireworks like this feel more leisurely.

秋の夜なイメージ。このぐらいの花火の方がゆっくり楽しめる感じがします。

Tsuruoka city, Yamagata pref, Japan

Wayve and Uber have launched self-driving rides in London, but what's more interesting is what is planned for the next few months and years. As of today, the plan is for 15 electric Ford Mustangs, equipped with the Wayve AI driver, to roam the capital, picking up passengers with a safety driver on hand to keep an eye on things. However, at a launch event on Thursday, Wayve showed off the follow-up to the Mustang: a Nissan LEAF, which will run the Wayve AI Driver using NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion. This glimpse into the future was arguably more intriguing than today's electric Mustang. Unlike the Mustang, the LEAF's self-driving equipment looked as though it might have been part of the car's design, from a roof-mounted sensor pack that followed the roofline, through to sensors attached to the wings and bumpers. A Wayve representative told us it had worked with Nissan on the integration. That said, the tech is relatively agnostic when it comes to platforms and sensor configurations. Wayve was, however, a little less forthcoming at the launch event about the underlying technology changes between the Nissan-based prototype on show and the Mustang parked up in front of it. The hope is that the update will reach UK roads next year, although that depends on several factors, including technology and regulations. Right now, Uber stated, "The initial launch phase features supervised autonomous rides, meaning a trained and TfL licensed private hire driver is onboard to oversee the trip." So no San Francisco Waymo-esque rides with the driver's seat spookily empty just yet. However, a Wayve representative told us the Nissan LEAF would eventually be capable of such a feat. The rollout of the Mustang feels a little like a stunt to steal a march on competitors such as Waymo, which has also had vehicles rolling around the tricky streets and traffic of London. Waymo is presently in a testing phase, but Wayve and Uber are now taking paying passengers. Both services, however, must have a trained driver onboard, poised to intervene if the need arises. The untried nature of the Wayve and Uber Mustang is evidenced by the words "TEST VEHICLE. KEEP A SAFE DISTANCE" printed on the rear of the car. Paying passengers are part of the AI Driver's learning process, with lessons learned feeding into the next generation of autonomous vehicles, which might, or might not, still need that safety driver behind the wheel, just in case. Wayve was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in London. It has trained its AI tech on the city's roads since 2018. In 2024, Wayve partnered with Uber, which included an investment to deploy vehicles with Wayve's technology in 12 markets worldwide, starting with London. The LEAF will first see action in Tokyo. ®

peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:

Tarumizu Ruins
垂水遺跡

It seems the Tarumizu Ruins might have been created by excavating beneath large rocks; there are scattered spots that resemble caves.

垂水遺跡はこのように大きな岩の下を掘られてできたのかな、洞窟っぽい箇所が点々とあります。

Yamagata city, Yamagata pref, Japan

Na een onstuimige vrijdag met wind en regen maakt de zomer dit weekend een verrassende comeback. Vooral zondag en maandag worden zonovergoten nazomerdagen met temperaturen tot 25 graden, maar daarna slaat het weer opnieuw om.

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy:

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Winds–style supply chain attacks.

“The trust model is broken,” Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. “Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don’t question them­and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer­SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today’s guards don’t cover it.”

Ian & Marg has added a photo to the pool:

"Charles Whitton" of Southend, being transferred from straddle carrier to slipway cradle at Beachport, South Australia, under the supervision of the boatyard master, David Stehbens.

​Deze week kwamen er tijdens de coronaverhoren een aantal opvallende, vaak ook ongepaste appjes boven water. Zo kon burgemeester Bruls volgens toenmalig minister Grapperhaus ‘de ziekte krijgen’ en stuurde Hugo de Jonge dat zijn collega’s ‘ooit gestraft zullen worden in het hiernamaals’. Ook van doventolk Irma Sluis lekte een opvallend appje uit: ‘’

Wat Sluis bedoelde met dit appje en aan wie het was gericht, blijft onduidelijk. Mogelijk was ze op een bepaald punt tijdens de crisis klaar met het tolken van maatregelen waar ze het persoonlijk misschien wel helemaal niet achter stond. Zelf wil ze in woord noch gebaar reageren op de uitgelekte appjes.

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Onder de verdachten zijn zestien Fransen, elf Nederlanders, twee Algerijnen, een Libiër, een Oekraïner en een Belg, aldus het Openbaar Ministerie.

SANAA (ANP/AFP) - Bij gevechten in Jemen tussen Houthi's en regeringstroepen zijn sinds donderdag 81 doden gevallen, volgens militaire en medische bronnen uit het land. De gevechten ontstonden nadat Houthi's aanvallen uitvoerden op verschillende kustgebieden om controle te krijgen over de zeestraat Bab al-Mandeb, een van de drukste scheepvaartroutes ter wereld.

Door de blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz is Bab al-Mandeb belangrijker geworden als doorvoerroute voor olie uit Saudi-Arabië. Met het offensief willen de Houthi's de door de regering gecontroleerde havenstad Mokka afsnijden van gebieden die onder controle staan van de regering. Daarna kunnen Houthi's oprukken naar gebieden die grenzen aan Bab al-Mandeb, zeiden militaire bronnen tegen persbureau AFP.

De Houthi's hebben al verhoogde gebieden ingenomen met uitzicht op regeringsposities nabij de Rode Zee. Vanuit deze locaties kunnen de Houthi's schepen aanvallen, aldus een militaire bron tegen AFP. De rebellen hebben afgelopen weken al herhaaldelijk Saudische schepen aangevallen.